


When All Roads Lead to Rome

by roebling



Category: Bandom, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-05
Updated: 2007-01-05
Packaged: 2017-10-23 03:20:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roebling/pseuds/roebling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by a post from right after Brent-gate in which there were some blurry pictures of Spencer, apparently unrecognizable after a new haircut. Many of comments were along the lines of 'OH NO NOT SPENCER TOO' ...</p>
            </blockquote>





	When All Roads Lead to Rome

They kicked him out of the band and replaced him with some kid from outside Chicago named Winston who probably wasn’t a better drummer but who did look better sandwiched between Brendon and Ryan on the cover of magazines and during television interviews.

And that was fine. Spencer was angry; of course he was angry, because he was young and not all that jaded yet and this was the worst, most devastating betrayal he’d ever had to face. So he was angry, furious, hurt; he still wasn’t going to act like a child, like Brent had acted, because ultimately there was nothing he could do and if that’s how much Ryan and Brendon and Pete fucking Wentz appreciated him, then they could take their fucking band and shove it.

He packed his bags and didn’t even spend the night at a hotel. He slept curled up on an uncomfortable plastic chair in a cold airport terminal, waiting to board the first flight back to Las Vegas. He didn’t cry or even think about them that much. Mostly, he slept.

Las Vegas was too hot and dry and safe and familiar. His mother flew into hysterics when she saw him, threatening to call Ryan’s mother and tell her what her son had done. Spencer hushed his mother and told her that it was fine, fine, and he didn’t care that much. And he didn’t. Mostly, he just felt empty.

Those first few months were so long. He slept twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day, and went for stretches of two and three days at a time without getting changed out of the sweatpants and tee shirt he went to bed in. A lot of his time was spent on the couch eating the peanut butter, honey, and banana sandwiches his mother made him or chips from the bag and watching the daytime soaps. He never, never turned on MTV or Fuse or any of those networks – out of sheer pique, but also because the programming on those channels was not really very high quality and was never particularly engaging. Between daytime television and maybe a couple of naps, he could easily make it to six o’clock before that creeping feeling of despair started to set in.

Then one morning he woke up and realized he’d been home for three months and he’d done … nothing. He hadn’t even unpacked properly. He’d put on twenty pounds and his hair was lank and fell in front of his face in greasy snarls. He was disgusted with himself because he wasn’t going to be that guy – that never-was. He wasn’t going to be some loser who worked at a gas station or in one of the hotels and sat around getting drunk at night reminiscing about what was and what might have been.

So he sat down and made himself a list, and the first thing he did after that was clean out his room, throwing away a ton of shit: lots of old pictures of Ryan and himself that he knew he would regret throwing away one day, and old clothing, and all the posters of the bands they’d adored when they were kids, and he did five loads of wash and then took a shower himself and knew he couldn’t go on as he had been.

He enrolled in classes at the community college and started drumming again, just in his parents’ basement but it was better than nothing, and he wasn’t going to give it up. He wasn’t going to let them do that to him. Being back in a classroom was strange, and the college was pretty unsatisfying, because there were parties every weekend but they were pretty lame compared to what he was used to – or what he had been used to, at least.

He knew then that he had to leave, because living at home was making him crazy. He wasn’t a child any more. His mother had nothing to do but breathe over his shoulder and cook elaborate dinners that Spencer never really wanted to eat. When he told her he had decided to become a vegetarian, she burst into tears in the middle of the kitchen. He also started doing yoga and playing tennis – he’d been on the team in high school but hadn’t touched a racquet since. He kept himself busy, he was fairly happy, but nothing really seemed right.

So he left. He had some money left from the band and his grades that first semester were pretty good, good enough, apparently, to get a partial scholarship to a small private university in Washington state, which was a green, cool place, unlike anywhere he’d ever known. Classes started on a Tuesday, and by the next Saturday he’d already found a regular tennis partner.

College was a wonderful, wonderful strange place. He didn’t live on campus but in an apartment close to the center of the little collegiate town with a kid named Chris who studied Political Science and Eastern Religions and played the keyboards in a nameless collective that was too amorphous, in Spencer’s opinion, to be considered a real band. Spencer jammed with them sometimes and went to the practices more often, which weren’t like the practices Spencer remembered from those very early months not all that long ago, playing in his grandmother’s living room and all of them tense and striving so hard to be able to make something worthwhile. These practices were more like parties, because there was always a lot of beer and nobody really cared much if they got through all of the songs because nobody even knew what all the songs were.

Classes were good; Spencer hadn’t known what he’d wanted to study so he’d taken general things, classes to fulfill the general education requirements, but they were mostly interesting anyway. Science he wasn’t wild about, but he loved his cultural anthropology class and adored linguistics. He blew off class no more or less often than anyone else, but he did do most of his homework and he’d never needed to do much studying to get good grades.

It was a nice life. It was a really nice life, and it was better in some ways than all those weeks on the stinking tour bus had ever been. One night, he got a phone call from Brent, who started to say something like – “You know you had this coming to you, you bastard. You should have rea -- ” but Spencer didn’t really care about him and definitely didn’t want to think about the band so he hung up.

He told his new friends, and they thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. He thought they might mock him but most of them just ended up mocking the band, which was sad in a way but now, from this distance, he had to admit they had a point. It was ridiculous, with the makeup and everything, and the some of the lyrics were so gauche that he marveled that Brendon was able to sing them with a straight face. The music he played now, when he played it, was different, and the guys he hung out with were definitely not the kind of guys who would ever be impressed by him telling them that he’d been friends with Pete Wentz.

Spencer met a guy named Ben at a show the second week of October and by the first week of November they were dating or something. Spencer had never really thought about being gay, because when he’d been in a band with Ryan and Brendon there hadn’t been much point: who was ever, ever going to pick Spencer over those two? They were small and slim and pretty and they knew it; they were never plagued by the kind of awkward unease that Spencer always felt. But even if he’d never thought about it, he always had kind of known what he was, and now, at nineteen years old, there was no reason to deny it. Ben was cute, so cute, and Spencer was wild about him. He had darker skin and black curls and he was almost as tall as Spencer was. Spencer had slept with women but never with a guy, and when Ben asked him back to his apartment one night a few weeks after they met Spencer didn’t think twice about agreeing to go.

It wasn’t like either of them thought it was going to be true love but they got along really well and Spencer realized after a month that he was in a relationship with someone, a real adult relationship. It made him feel glad, and old, because that long distance bullshit on tour wasn’t really anything at all, was in many important ways less substantial than his paltry high school romances had been. Sometimes when he woke up in Ben’s place after spending the night he was so glad, because he knew Ryan and Brendon never got to do anything like this – it was always hotel rooms and rushed weekends and too earnest reassurances with them, and it always would be.

In his second semester Spencer declared as an anthropology major. His mother wanted him to double major in business but he didn’t have a great head for numbers and really couldn’t think of anything less interesting. He liked anthropology because it gave him new ways to look at people, and consequently at everything. Numbers were dry and so abstract. He was behind: out of high school almost three years and he had only twenty-four credits to his name. But it was okay and after convincing his mother it would be necessary he decided to keep his apartment for the summer, to stay at college and take classes and also to be near Ben and to be able to keep playing with the same group of guys, because they had something going that wasn’t really anything yet, but felt like it could be something soon.

And even after he and Ben split up (things were getting stale, and they didn’t know what they wanted from each other any longer, but they agreed to still be friends) it was a good summer, because there were parties and warm rainy nights and the band – it became a band sometime during the moist hot month of June, five of them meeting up almost every day to play – was going really well, and even classes were interesting, so much so that some nights Spencer would go and sit in the library and read ethnographies for hours. He started drinking that summer – not in a bad way, but regularly, maybe one or two times a week, and every time he felt himself start to get kind of muffled and wonderfully soft feeling, it felt like a triumph over something, although he never dwelt on it long enough to figure out what.

There were other guys that summer. Spencer experienced a wave of popularity like nothing he’d ever known. He and Chris had the biggest apartment so it was usually their place where people came to party on the weekends, and he slept with six different guys that summer, three of them more than once, and once two of them at the same time. He went to a lot of concerts, driving to Portland or sometimes all the way to Seattle to see some band in Chris’s beat up Buick and then driving back and getting home at five or six the next morning. It was a very glorious, very dear kind of life. He sometimes thought about what he would be doing if they hadn’t kicked him out and he couldn’t picture anything except the awful bleary sameness of airports and beige hotel rooms and foreign places where people loved you but couldn’t pronounce your name.

He wasn’t bitter, he was startled to realize. He really wasn’t bitter at all.

The week before the fall semester started Spencer was at a bookstore browsing when he saw a tiny little blond girl, not a day older than sixteen, wearing a Panic! at the Disco shirt. It was new; he didn’t recognize the design. He was stricken suddenly, and felt a sharp pain in his chest, something he’d tried to ignore for so long. He tried never to read about them and avoided their television appearances like the plague, but he’d heard enough to know that things were still going well for them, better now, even, although maybe that wasn’t so surprising; that had been the point, after all.

He asked her, “You like those guys?” and motioned vaguely at her chest. He didn’t think there was much chance she’d recognize him, because their fan base had probably quadrupled since he’d been in the band.

“Yeah,” she said, and she looked at him suspiciously, because he knew he didn’t look like the kind of guy who would be listening to such a band, not even close.

“I … uh, I went to high school with one of those guys,” he said lamely. “The guitarist, Ryan …”

Her eyes kind of lit up. “Oh wow, really? Ryan is so amazing. He’s the hottest guy in the world. I really want to go see them next week but I don’t know if my mom will let me …”

He stopped listening, and had to walk away while the girl was still running her mouth lest he say something rather inopportune.

It was easy enough after that to find out that they were playing two Thursdays on at an arena a half an hour away. The college radio station was even giving away a couple of pairs of tickets. It was coincidence, pure coincidence because none of them knew where he was going to college, but Spencer still felt something twist in his stomach. The irony of it all was that he was supposed to play a show at a joint in the same town the night after.

It ate at him, like he’d never thought it would. He didn’t want to go see them, couldn’t think of anything he’d like to do less, actually, because he knew he’d be standing down there in the audience and unable to think of anything at all except what it had felt like to be up on the stage, but at the same time he knew he couldn’t just pretend that they weren’t going to be a half an hour away. That whole week, nothing could really distract him. He kept playing it out in his head: walking backstage after the show, Ryan’s face lighting up, a few moments of perfunctory awkward conversation and then everything as it had always been. It was nice to think about but he knew it wouldn’t happen and the thought of actually facing Ryan made him kind of sick, because the plain truth was that even if it wasn’t Ryan’s idea to kick him out of the band, Ryan had agreed to it, and Spencer didn’t want to think about that, couldn’t really, even after all this time.

He didn’t know what to do but he knew he needed to do something or he was going to go crazy so he called Jon. He had kept Jon’s cell phone number all this time, because he liked Jon, even if he’d only really known him for a handful of months. He’d like Jon even before Jon had been in the band, and so it stood to reason that he’d like Jon after he wasn’t a part of the band himself. Jon was a really good guy; there wasn’t any bullshit with him. He dialed and the phone rang and Spencer wanted to hang up, almost did, but then Jon picked up before he could make up his mind.

“Hello?” he said.

“Uh, hey Jon,” Spencer said. “It’s Spencer. Smith.”

There was a moment of awful silence before Jon said, “Oh my god, Spencer! Dude, how are you?”

“Fine,” Spencer said, relieved. “I’m great. How are you doing?”

Jon laughed. “You know,” he said. “Good, great, fine. But man, Spencer, it’s been forever. What the fuck have you been doing?”

“Not much,” Spencer said, although he didn’t think that was really true. “I’m in school, just doing the college thing, I guess.”

“Just the college thing? If I know you you’re probably like studying astrophysics at MIT or something,” Jon said.

“Anthropology, actually,” Spencer said. “But you know, they’re related disciplines. Practically the same department.”

Jon chuckled. “I don’t even know what the fuck that is. But that’s awesome Spence. I uh. I think everyone’s been wondering about you.”

“Yeah,” Spencer said. “Well, I’ve hardly been in hiding.”

“Yeah,” said Jon. “Well.”

That was the way it went, and it wasn’t fair because none of it was Jon’s fault, not really, but Spencer hurt more and more deeply than he would ever admit. Spencer turned down the offer of a pair of tickets to the show at the arena, but invited Jon to come out to the bar the next night, if he was still in town. He would be, but he said he didn’t know if he could make it.

Spencer felt glad that he’d called, afterwards, felt like he’d been a bigger person, taken a big step, something like that. He didn’t hold out much hope of Jon coming to see him, but he’d made the offer and that was what mattered, maybe. He had a twelve-page paper due that Thursday about the origins of Structuralism so he had to spend a couple of nights in the library, holing up until two or three in the morning and subsisting mostly just on the strong coffee they sold in the student lounge. By the time Thursday night rolled around, he was dead tired and not thinking about much at all. Some kids he knew were having a party at their house, fifteen minutes north of school. Spencer and Chris walked so they didn’t have to worry about the car. It was a warm evening and they were arguing amicably about military intervention in third world countries, and Spencer was so vehemently certain that it was never warranted, that he forgot to think about how his friends – his best friends in the entire world, closer than brothers they’d once been – were not even fifty miles away.

Of course they woke up late the next day, groggily rolling out of bed at two with aching heads and nobody looking forward to having to load all of the equipment in the van and drive a half an hour up the freeway and unload it all and then play and then reload it all and then go home. Of course they didn’t have anybody to help them out; they didn’t have a label or a contract or even a name, really. There was a guy named Seth who came along and helped them cart shit sometimes but he had a big exam the next week and wasn’t coming, so it was just four of them. They had to cash in some change that the bassist, a dude called Peej, had been saving in a beer stein in his closet just to have enough money for gas to get to the damn bar.

But then they got there, almost on time actually, and the owner was a good guy and gave them all a beer before they set up, even though Spencer wasn’t even twenty-one yet, wouldn’t be for like nine fucking months or something ridiculous. They got set up and mostly all of the equipment worked and the shit that didn’t work they had to deal with, or try to fix as best they could with duct tape. And it was nine and they didn’t have to go on for an hour so they went and smoked a joint back stage, which was really just an empty room with cement floors and a couple of old kegs in one corner.

And it was so different, when someone came back and told them that it was time for their set to start, because there wasn’t any build up at all. Spencer downed the rest of his beer and the whole world felt slightly unsteady, but in a good way, and then they kind of ambled out on to the stage, and they weren’t deafened by cheers and shouts but the silence was possibly a respectful one. They fucked up the intro to the first song but then they nailed it the second time and there were a few kids in the audience, actually just three girls they knew from the college, who knew the lyrics and sang along enthusiastically and badly during the chorus. Chris sang and played guitar and because he was drunk he was a little mouthy, but it was okay because mostly the audience loved it, laughing and laughing every time he spat out another string of profanities.

Spencer loved it, every minute of it. He didn’t have to worry about wearing fucking weird costumes that made him look like a dick. He just sat behind the drum set and threw his heart and his whole body into it and by the time they’d gotten through the set list (hastily scribbled on the back of a pizza lid in green crayon) he was soaked through with sweat and felt as good as he could ever remember feeling.

“Fuck,” Peej said as they walked backstage, and Spencer couldn’t say anything because that summed up the experience so completely: it was something wilder and more profane than what he’d ever known before.

And then one of the bouncers, big and bored, was knocking on the door halfheartedly and he said, “This guy says he knows the drummer.”

It was Jon, standing in the doorway, still wearing his damn flip-flops, and Spencer didn’t know what to do so he laughed and gave Jon a fucking huge ridiculous hug.

“Spencer fucking Smith,” Jon said, and he grinned his same old grin, and it was so good to see him. “It has been way too long.”

“I know,” Spencer said. “I know. Shit. How are you, dude?”

Jon said, “Same old, same old. You know how that business is. But man, Spence, that was wild.”

Spencer introduced Jon to the guys as an old friend, which was the truth, and he was so glad that Jon had come, because he was just such a fucking awesome dude, someone who was always exactly what you wanted him to be, never anything deceptive or false. They played another set, and Jon stood on the side of the stage and bopped in place and sang along when he knew the words, because they ran out of originals and had to start taking requests from the audience, which was fine until someone asked for that song by the American Idol girl, and Chris agreed to try it despite the fact that nobody knew any of the chords and he only knew the words to the chorus. But then Jon ran on stage and whispered something in Chris’s ear and Chris grinned and ceded the microphone and soon enough the whole fucking place had joined in on a Jon Walker-led choral rendition of ‘Since U Been Gone’.

After that chaos reigned; some girl who might actually have been a guy got invited up on stage and performed a fifteen minute medley of Spice Girl hits that culminated with Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’ and none of them had any fucking idea how to play those songs so they just improvised. Then the management wanted them off stage and that was okay, too because Spencer’s head was starting to spin. The speakers squealed with feedback and everything got a little quieter and there were a few strange empty moments before some shitty classic rock mix started playing through the sound system again.

Backstage everyone was coming down and talking loudly.

“You are my new hero,” Spencer told Jon, and Jon grinned and modestly said, “It was nothing.”

“It was transcendent,” Peej said, coming up and throwing his arm around Jon’s shoulder. “Shit, Spencer, you need to bring around your old buddies more often.”

Then they had to cart all the equipment back out to the van because the owner was starting to get a little pissy with them, but Jon and some other guys they kind of knew were there were helping so it went much more quickly, and it was just barely one o’clock, and since the next day was Saturday they all decided they’d go back to Spencer and Chris’s apartment for a while, with another car of friends following them. Someone mentioned something about a drum circle, and yeah, they were kind of that fucked up, because it seemed like a good idea and as soon as they got home everyone grabbed a percussion instrument (ranging from the various components of Spencer’s drum kit to Chris’s djembas to empty coffee cans) and they all trouped down the street to the little park on the corner, where in a circle on dew-damp grass they danced and they played and they smoked until they where spooked by the sudden red flash of a police car’s lights and the shrill sudden blare of the siren.

Spencer didn’t remember going to sleep, but he woke up in his own bed the next morning, wearing a dirty tee shirt and his underwear, and Jon was asleep next to him, his head thrown back and snoring lightly. It was light out. Spencer felt stiff and weary, but not bad. He closed his eyes and was slipping back into sleep when Jon’s cell phone rang loudly.

It was Ryan, or someone. Spencer doubted very much it was Brendon. But after he hung up Jon Walker sat up and scrubbed his face roughly with his hand and his hair was sticking up all over the place, and he looked like shit but also like someone who was recovering from a very good time. Spencer was familiar with that look.

“Damn,” said Jon. “I’m fucking late.”

He stood up and then stopped and looked long and hard at Spencer and asked, “This is a fucking lot to ask, but do you think you could drive me to the next rest area on the highway? They’re going to meet me there in the bus.”

Spencer closed his eyes and wanted to say no, but Jon had been such a good sport that he just got up and started digging in his dresser for something clean to wear and they were in the car and on the road in fifteen minutes flat. Spencer would have driven straight on, but Jon was rather worse for the wear and they stopped and got coffee at a little diner somewhere, and Jon was so charmed by the place and by the little old lady with her silvery dyed hair that waited on them there that he let her persuade him to eat a piece of cherry pie, which had to be abandoned halfway through when Jon’s cell phone rang again, and he answered it to learn that if he didn’t get his ass to the bus as fast as humanly possibly they were going to leave him to walk to fucking Sacramento.

Then they were doing eighty up the highway, the radio blasting, and it was still really early, or it felt that way at least. When Spencer saw the first sign for the rest area, three miles ahead, it was too soon. The bus was parked over by the gas station, a huge hulking black thing, gleaming and impenetrable. The door was open and there were a few people milling around outside. Spencer pulled up along side it and didn’t even put the car into park, just kept his foot on the gas while Jon undid his seat belt and opened the door. It was Ryan who was standing by the door to the bus, and he looked just the same, and it made Spencer’s heart clench painfully.

“It was so fucking good to see you,” Jon said, and he hugged Spencer tightly. “You’ll send me your demo, right?”

“Right,” Spencer said laughing, because there wasn’t a demo and there probably wouldn’t ever be a demo.

“You sure you don’t want to come say hello?” Jon asked, tipping his head towards bus.

“No, not right now,” Spencer said, and he smiled and tired not to sound too sad.

“We’re gonna keep in touch,” Jon said, even as Ryan was shouting for him to hurry the hell up.

“Yeah,” said Spencer. “Definitely. I’ll call you. Or you call me.”

“Yes,” Jon said. “See you, kid.”

He waved and slammed the door shut and ran off towards the bus, losing one of his flip-flops as he went. Spencer closed his eyes for a moment, put his foot on the gas, and didn’t look back.

But he and Jon did keep in touch. They exchanged emails pretty regularly and spoke on the phone every couple of weeks, and Spencer never knew who it was Jon told Ryan he was talking to, because he was pretty positive Jon wasn’t telling the truth. Spencer managed not to think about all of that so much, though, because his own band was actually experiencing some success, if securing a regular twice-a-month gig at a club constituted such. He was doing really well in school, too, somehow, enough so that he was being asked to try for the Anthropology honors program, which involved writing a long paper and interviews with a board and, if he were accepted, would eventually result in a whole summer of his own honest to goodness research, sponsored by the University. Plus the lease on the apartment was up and because he and Chris were sick of having to put out pots and bowls to catch the drips every time there was a hard rain, they were looking for a new place. There were some really nice old houses over closer to the school, and the neighborhood wasn’t so great so rents were low. They’d have more bedrooms then, and Peej was probably going to move in with them, and maybe this girl Coco who was a studio art major and had dated Chris before deciding maybe she was asexual.

Spencer went home for Christmas that year and he knew that things had changed because his mother didn’t buy him polo shirts in tacky colors or worry that he was too skinny or too sallow or not getting enough sleep and she didn’t once attempt to give him a haircut in the kitchen. It was fine, mostly, and he was so glad to see his parents. He’d missed them more than he’d realized, even though he knew he didn’t need them anymore, not like he once had. They were both proud of how well he was doing in school, even though neither was very interested in talking about theories of cultural capital with him. A few days after Christmas he drove by Ryan’s old house, and it was decked out and decorated like it had never been when they were kids. Spencer knew that Ryan’s mother had sold the place and had moved down to Florida to be near her sister, and he didn’t know where Ryan lived, but it was still so strange to drive by that house where he’d spent so many hours as a kid and think he’d never walk up those familiar concrete steps ever again.

The beginning of second semester was dull and cold. The skies were always a bleary grey and Spencer longed a little more poignantly for the desert. Chris was having problems with his girlfriend and spending too much time stoned and Spencer couldn’t handle that, so a lot of evenings he ended up in a bar or a coffee house, always with his books, and he would sit and read for hours. He harnessed powers of concentration he never knew he had, practiced making himself invisible. Spencer had spent so long as a kid being the kind of person nobody really cared about that he’d had to push himself forward, into the spotlight, always struggled to make sure that the people he cared about didn’t forget him, but he didn’t care about that any more. He just wanted some quiet and some warmth.

Because the synth player was graduating and moving out to Boston for grad school the band without a name was kind of falling apart. They didn’t play at the bar anymore but they stilled practiced and sometimes they could get someone to give them a hundred bucks to play a house party or at an art studio or something. He needed something to do, something that would make everything seem like it had a point, so he signed up to help some professor in the Sociology department with his research, which was a good position but actually really involved nothing more than reading a lot of articles and making some photocopies and sometimes summarizing stuff. Still, he got paid ten dollars an hour and the professor was an awesome old dude who’d been around forever and seen everything: he’d seen the Beatles play at Shea Stadium in 1965, and he’d protested during the Vietnam war and even today he had a blog where he wrote about the disgraceful state of the American political dialogue. Spencer liked him a lot, and the work kept him busy a couple of evenings a week.

Spencer drove to Eugene with a buddy of his named Anthony to see Prefuse 73 on a rainy Thursday night and they didn’t want to drive home afterwards so they went to a dive bar and slowly drank gin and tonics until the last call, at quarter to four. They walked around that little green city in the early morning and Spencer was wearing loafers that soon got soaked through, so they took refuge in a gazebo in a park and talked about space travel for a while, and then at five they wandered back down towards where they’d parked their car. There was an Ihop open so they went in, practically the first customers of the day. Spencer ate chocolate chip pancakes and Tony ate eggs and a greasy pile of bacon, and they got to drink all the strong coffee they could hold, so that before they left they’d both used the restroom two times. They were full and tired and they trudged back to the car as a blue misty dawn broke and there was nothing left to do and they didn’t have any money left for anything but gas anyway so they got back on the driveway and started home.

Spencer dropped off Anthony and he was so tired all he could think about was getting home and kicking his shoes off as he walked in the door and then falling face first into his soft bed and pulling the grey comforter up over his head and sleeping for hours, because it was a Friday and he had a paper he needed to draft but apart from that he had no obligations until Monday morning, and if he slept for that long – eight or so hours unbroken – he’d have enough time to dream up myriad lives, myriad universes and eternities.

There was a silver car parked in the driveway and for a moment Spencer thought he was more out of it than he’d realized and he was trying to pull into the wrong house, but no, there was the peace flag Chris had hung up last year on the eleventh of September, and yet there was this shiny little silver car parked in the driveway, a car Spencer had never seen before. Nobody he knew drove an Audi, anyway, especially not a convertible, especially not this year’s model.

So he parked on the street and locked all the doors for once, because this was weird shit and you couldn’t be too careful. The little silver car had California plates. He walked around it up the walk to the door and noticed that there was some guy asleep in the driver’s seat, head drooping towards his shoulder and a big black sweatshirt thrown over him like a blanket. Since the guy had parked in his driveway, and Spencer knew from experience that sleeping in a car wasn’t the most fun a person could ever have, he knocked on the window. The guy stirred so Spencer knocked again, and this time the guy really woke up, stretching out and rubbing the sleep from his eye and Spencer stepped back and closed his eyes and then opened them again because he really was probably pretty out of it – that had been a wild show the night before and then they’d probably had a little too much to drink afterwards, and he was running on no sleep at all.

But Ryan just got out of the car and stood up, and he was … something. Shorter than Spencer remembered him being, when really Spencer was just taller.

“Hey,” said Spencer.

“Hey,” Ryan said.

Ryan was wearing eyeliner and strange pants with a bold print and he stared at Spencer for a while, his eyes narrowed.

“Jon gave you my address?” Spencer asked.

“No,” said Ryan. “No. Nobody knows I’m here. I was using his laptop one day and I saw one of your emails and I read it. I got your address from his sidekick.”

Spencer laughed roughly. “Fuck, he probably would have just given it to you if you’d asked,” he said. “Better than you spying on him and shit.”

“He never told us he was talking to you,” Ryan said. The unsaid accusation stung.

Spencer sighed. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I need some coffee.”

Ryan shrugged. He was cold and silent and he seemed … harder than Spencer remembered. Spencer could tell the jacket he was wearing was expensive and he wasn’t as gangling as he’d once been. He slipped his hands in his pockets and stood to the side as Spencer unlocked the front door. The house was messy – Chris and Peej were out of town for the week and they hadn’t tidied up any of their shit before they left so there was a half completed puzzle on the coffee table and a distinctly musky odor hanging in the air. Spencer led Ryan through the disorder of the living room into the kitchen and rattled through the cupboards, looking for the can of Folgers, because if he was going to have this conversation he definitely needed more caffeine.

“So,” Ryan said.

Spencer was measuring out teaspoons of coffee into the filter. Chris insisted they used unbleached filters and that meant that you had to use more coffee or something. Otherwise Spencer didn’t think it tasted the same. He looked up briefly. Ryan was leaning against the counter with his shoulders hunched and his arms crossed over his chest.

“Your house is nice,” Ryan said.

“It’s not really my house,” Spencer said as he waited for the tap water to warm up. “I’m just renting. I live here with a couple of buddies of mine.”

“Oh,” said Ryan. “Huh.”

“You’re living in California now?” Spencer said conversationally.

“Yeah,” Ryan replies. “I have a place in LA. It’s more convenient for … recording and stuff.”

“I would imagine,” said Spencer.

Ryan didn’t say anything so Spencer busied himself getting out two mugs and sugar and and milk even though he took his coffee black. He felt a little bleary and took two vitamin C tablets to ward off any infections. The coffee burbled as it dripped down into the waiting pot.

“Listen,” Spencer said. “Since you went through all the trouble of driving up here and stealing my address from Jon, you must want something. I didn’t sleep last night and if we’re just going to stand around and gawk at each other, I’ll take a pass.” He sounded mean and he knew he sounded mean but he couldn’t help it.

Ryan looked at his feet for a while. “I just … Why did you talk to Jon, Spence?” he asked. “I missed you and I didn’t know where the hell you were, hadn’t heard from you in like two year, and I find out you’re talking to Jon? I’m your best friend, Spencer.”

“Ryan,” Spencer said. “You kicked me out, okay? I don’t really care why. It’s over now, and maybe it’s a fucking good thing you kicked me out. Maybe it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But that was your decision.”

Spencer poured them coffee and spilt some on the counter in his haste. He passed Ryan one of the mugs and sipped slowly at his. It was still very hot, and maybe a little too strong, but he didn’t mind that.

They drank their coffee slowly. Spencer stared at the clock and calculated he’d been awake for nearly an entire day. Ryan’s phone rang once but he just glanced at the number and let it go to his voice mail – which was something, Spencer thought.

“Congratulations on the album,” he said after a while, even though he’d never listened to that second album and didn’t know if he would ever be able to.

“Thank you,” Ryan said humbly. “It’s not perfect but I put as much into it as I could.”

“I know,” said Spencer, too quickly. “You wouldn’t settle for anything less.”

Ryan smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “You think?”

“I know you,” Spencer said quietly. “You might be kind of a flake, but you take your music seriously.”

“Thanks,” Ryan said. “I think.” But he was laughing, a little.

Spencer smiled. It was so strange. He was so far away from the person he’d been the last time he’d stood around and joked with Ryan, and yet it was as natural as breathing, as anything.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m fucking exhausted but it’s a Friday and you drove all the way up here. Do you want to do something today? We don’t have to talk about … anything.”

Ryan’s face lit up. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I would really like that. I have to get back to L.A. by tomorrow, but I can drive all night. I drove all night to get here. And we could have today.”

“Okay. I’m going to finish this coffee and I’m going to get changed and we can go into town,” Spencer said and he downed the rest of his coffee in one swallow, choking as it burned, and tugging off his sweater. He hadn’t done wash in a rather dismally long time and didn’t really have any clean clothing to wear, and it was awful but he wanted to look nice for Ryan, didn’t want Ryan to think he was just some sloppy college kid, Ryan who’d always been hyper-aware of appearances and now wore designer clothes and eyeliner for fifteen hour car trips to visit lapsed friends.

But then he realized he was being kind of an ass, so he just borrowed a pair of slacks from Chris that were folded and didn’t look dirty and pulled on a different sweater over his tee shirt. His hair was doing wild things, but he didn’t feel like taking a shower so he just patted it down as best as he could.

Ryan was still slowly sipping his coffee in the kitchen.

“Ready to go?” Spencer asked him.

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Yes, I am.”

Ryan said he would drive but Spencer said there was no point. There wasn’t anywhere they were going they couldn’t walk to. And it was nicer to walk. It was still cold out but it never got that cold, and they walked slowly towards the center of town. It was hard not to talk about the band, and sometimes Ryan would be in the middle of a sentence and stop, as if mentally censoring himself. They’d been best friends for almost fifteen years before they’d stopped talking, but now it felt like the intervening two years had ruined everything, or changed them both so much that there wasn’t even much of a point any more.

But then sometimes it was good, and Ryan would say something stupid and it felt natural for Spencer to laugh at him for it, and Ryan didn’t get offended or anything. The town was just stirring as they got into the center. The little shops were open but everything was still drowsy and sullen. Ryan said he was hungry so they went to a little bakery and he ate a cranberry muffin while Spencer downed another cup of coffee. One of the girls who was working behind the counter, a little slip of nothing with long dark hair, just out of high school, recognized Ryan and he signed an autograph for her on a napkin and smiled and was much more graceful about the whole thing than Spencer remembered him being, even back at first when the fans had been far fewer.

Ryan seemed a little embarrassed by that, and Spencer hadn’t thought about them running into … his fans, but maybe they would, because maybe the band was a hell of a lot more popular than he ever really thought about. Well, it’s not like they were going to go to the mall or something. Instead he took Ryan to his favorite bookstore, even though Ryan had never been the biggest on reading. It was in an old house and every room housed a different type of book. Spencer liked the social sciences section in one of the old bedrooms upstairs because there was an amazingly comfortable couch up there and, being not the most popular genre, he could spend hours browsing and reading without a single soul disturbing his peace.

A friend of Spencer’s from the Anthro department was down in the periodical room and she greeted him warmly when she saw him come in. Spencer introduced her to Ryan, but she was a focused and serious girl and she soon engaged him in debate about the reading they’d had to do for next week’s class. Spencer disagreed with how she’s interpreted part of it and got angry that she refused to acknowledge the validity of his alternative interpretation, and soon they were arguing pretty loudly, right up until she looked at her watch and realized that she was running late for an appointment. She bid him farewell cordially but he had no doubt she’d try to continue the argument in the next week’s class.

Ryan was browsing a shelf full of National Geographics from the seventies rather dejectedly.

“Sorry,” Spencer said. “That girl is a bitch.”

“It’s okay,” Ryan said. “That was heavy shit you were talking about.”

“Well, I guess,” Spencer said. “I think you just need to accustomize yourself to the vocabulary.”

“Dude,” Ryan laughed. “You talk like you ate a thesaurus.”

“That was not funny.” Spencer rolled his eyes and said, “That was lame, Ryan.”

Ryan was still laughing though, cracking himself up, actually. “Whatever, braniac,” he said. “Imagine if Brendon could hear you now.”

Spencer bristled. “Yeah,” he said, tersely. “Imagine.” He pressed his lips together into a thin line. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. He was quiet for a moment, his eyes downcast. “You’re pissed.”

“No,” Spencer said. Then he pursed his lips and said, “Maybe a little.”

“I’m sorry,” Ryan said. “I don’t … I’m sorry, and I really can’t say more than that, Spence.”

“It’s okay,” Spencer said. “You had your reasons and it was so long ago. I’m in a different place now, and I’m doing fine and it doesn’t really matter …”

“Fuck that,” Ryan said, keeping his voice down because they were walking through the lobby, where the cash register and most of the customers were.

Spencer didn’t wait for him, just pushed through the line of people waiting at the register and took the steps two at a time, because it made him angry, whatever Ryan was trying to do. He could hear Ryan behind him, calling for him to stop, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to talk about it or think about it or anything, because Ryan was right and he was pissed and it did still hurt, and it always had.

Ryan caught up with him while he waited for a light at a cross walk to change from red to green. Spencer cursed under his breath and ignored the hand that Ryan put on his shoulder.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” he said.

“Well it’s what I came here to talk about,” Ryan said, sounding almost vicious. “I don’t want to play nice for a day and then go home and not see you again for two years.”

Spencer wanted to scream, wanted to tell Ryan it was his fucking fault, but you couldn’t do that kind of thing in this kind of town. “Let’s just go somewhere … private, please?” he pled, and he didn’t like how desperate he sounded.

“Fine,” Ryan said, and he didn’t say another word but his fair face was flush and his brows were knit.

They walked a ways down the main street towards Spencer’s favorite little park. In the summer it was a magnet for kids from the university with time to kill or reading to do, but in February it was grey and empty. There were a couple of benches that overlooked a little rank pond surrounded by fine old pine trees and they went and they sat on one of those benches and Spencer shoved his hands in the pockets of his pants, because it was a colder day than he’d realized and he hadn’t brought a jacket.

“Okay,” said Spencer. “You came here to talk, so we’ll talk.”

Ryan glanced at him. “You want to know something? Agreeing to ask you to leave the band was the biggest mistake I ever made,” he said softly.

Spencer swallowed loudly and tried to concentrate on a particular leaf hanging from a particular branch of a particular tree far across the pond.

“I really mean that, too,” Ryan said. “I thought at the time – I don’t know. I’m sure you felt it too. We were growing up. We were growing apart, and things were hard, and I thought it would be okay without you. You weren’t happy.”

“I was no less happy than you were,” Spencer said, but without any fire.

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “But.”

“But you write the songs and Brendon sings the songs and you two have the pretty faces,” Spencer finished, lamely. “It’s okay, Ry. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been over all of this in my head, and it’s fine. You had your reasons, and they weren’t perfect, but nothing ever is, right?”

“No,” Ryan said. “That’s not fair. They were fucking shitty reasons, awful, and I can’t believe I did that to you. I’ve known you longer than I’ve known anyone in the world, except my mother. What difference did it make if Brendon didn’t think you fit with the conception of the band? What the fuck was he even talking about and why did it ever sound like reason to me?”

“He’s a persuasive guy,” Spencer said. “And maybe he had a point.”

“No he didn’t,” Ryan said. “Not really. It was just … everything was at this point where it was either going to ignite and start blazing or else all go to ash, and I wanted so badly to have what I have now, and I was so scared and I didn’t know wanything. I just. I wanted it to be perfect, as perfect as I could make it, because I thought the band was all I had.”

“But you always had me,” Spencer reproached, gently.

“I know that now,” Ryan said. He rested his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees.

“It’s fine,” Spencer said.

Ryan was silent for a long time and Spencer picked up a handful of pebbles and tried skipping them into the pond, but none of them were flat and they just sank with a plop a very few seconds after he threw them.

“Let’s go get grilled cheese sandwiches,” Spencer suggested after a while, after the silence got so awful that he couldn’t take it and the cold had numbed his fingers red. Grilled cheese sandwiches were Ryan’s favorite.

 

“Okay,” Ryan said, so they got up and walked slowly to a place Spencer knew that served great grilled cheeses. There was a wait for a table, unsurprisingly, because it was a cheap place and a favorite with the college kids. Ryan wasn’t talking, wasn’t even looking in Spencer’s direction, so Spencer picked up one of the free magazines someone had left in the entrance and read for a while about upcoming anti-war protests and anti-fur protests and wondered if he’d have a good time throwing red paint on some poor lady in a fur coat her rich husband bought her. Probably not, he decided, but he didn’t like the idea of people wearing fur any better than he liked the idea of throwing paint on someone. There had to be some kind of happy medium.

Finally they were sat, in a tiny table way in the back, and that was fine but Spencer noticed at the next table over was a guy named David who he’d kind of dated a couple of months ago and Spencer didn’t know what to do about that, because Ryan didn’t even know he was gay, and honestly Spencer didn’t even know if Ryan was gay, or if his weirdness was something else entirely. But when it came down to it, David was a sweet guy, and he’d been great while they’d had their thing, so Spencer went over to him and said hello and David kissed him on the cheek and Spencer could feel that Ryan was watching him, but he tried to pretend that he couldn’t. David asked him how things were, and Spencer told him and asked in return, and they only talked for five minutes maybe, not long at all, quite the appropriate length of time to talk to an old flame who you’d had a good time with, once upon a time, and didn’t see nearly often enough.

Ryan was studiously examining the menu when Spencer got back to the table. The restaurant hardly had an extensive selection.

“Sorry,” Spencer said.

“’s okay,” Ryan said, glancing up. “Who’s that? Another friend from school.”

“Um,” Spencer said. “Kind of. We went out for a while.”

“Oh,” Ryan said, and he pressed his lips shut so tightly they were white.

“I guess Jon didn’t mention that,” Spencer said, and he felt like a complete ass, because he should have just said something, should have told Ryan before anyone, really.

“No,” Ryan said.

Spencer sighed. “Didn’t you have any idea?” he asked, because he knew he hadn’t been like … flaming. Hardly, but Ryan had known him better than anyone and there were definite clues.

“Honestly, no,” Ryan said.

“Oh,” Spencer said.

The waitress came to take their order and Ryan had a grilled cheese with tomato on white toast and Spencer had a grilled cheese without tomato on rye. Ryan wouldn’t say anything. It was so awkward, and Spencer wished he’d just sent him packing and spent the day sleeping.

“I should have told you,” he said, after the waitress came back with their drinks.

Ryan emptied sugar packets into his iced tea and didn’t look up.

“I was going to,” Spencer said. “But then …”

“But then what?” Ryan said.

“Well,” Spencer said. “You kicked me out.”

Ryan’s face went blank. “Oh,” he said. “You knew back then?”

“I had an idea,” Spencer said. “I’d never even kissed a guy before, but I had an idea.”

Their grilled cheeses came and they ate them in silence. Ryan had to cut the crusts off of his just like he always did. Spencer felt a little sick and very tired. His legs and arms felt heavy and his head spun and he wanted this to be over, or he wanted to cry, or something. He wanted to be done with it and he wanted Ryan to be gone and he wanted things to be the way they had been, because he’d known who he was and what he wanted then, and he never wanted this kind of thing, this uncertainty and the faintly ridiculous contention.

“Okay, you know why I didn’t tell you?” he asked Ryan, and Ryan nodded his head no, and his big eyes were still empty, and Spencer took a deep breath and said, “Because I thought I was in love with you.”

Spencer wanted Ryan to laugh or something, or at least to smile and say what a ridiculous thing that was, how funny, but Ryan didn’t do anything but go very white and set down his sandwich and say in a small voice, “Oh.” And then he said nothing else for a long time.

“Yeah,” said Spencer. He was tearing his napkin into little strips, and twisting them, and then littering his plate with the detritus.

“You should have told me that,” Ryan said.

Spencer laughed. “I was too scared,” Spencer said. “And what difference does it make?”

“Well I might have loved you back,” Ryan said.

And now Spencer had nothing to say.

“I probably would have,” Ryan said. “I bet.”

Spencer felt sick to his stomach so the next time the waitress came back he asked for the check and when she brought it he just left a twenty on the table and didn’t wait for change or anything, even though the total was less than ten dollars. It was okay; he was always a good tipper.

Outside he stood on the sidewalk for a moment and his head spun and the vertiginous effect of the cars rushing past just made it worse and he wanted maybe to throw himself in front of them, but not really. He just wanted to know why Ryan had said that, and what he’d meant, because either Ryan would have loved him back or wouldn’t have. There wasn’t room for any middle ground, and Spencer remembered what Ryan had been like back then and he didn’t think he’d had the energy to love anyone as uncertain as Spencer had been.

“Okay,” Spencer said. “What do you want to do now?”

Ryan shrugged his shoulders and then stood there slack and lazy, and Spencer didn’t know what to do, because he wasn’t used to play tour guide and it was admittedly kind of a boring town, at least at three in the afternoon in February on a Friday. He just started walking home and Ryan walked at his side and they didn’t talk at all, and the silence wasn’t so bad, outside, but soon they would have to say goodbye, and that was going to be awful.

They were back at the house, Ryan’s silver car still incongruous in the driveway. Spencer unlocked the door and they went inside, and nobody else was home, still. It was very quiet and dark. Ryan asked where the rest room was and Spencer showed him the door down the hall. He stood in the kitchen and stared at the ceiling for two minutes, five, and the water was still running. He could hear it.

He was still staring at the ceiling when he heard the door open and Ryan came out of the bathroom and walked up to him and said, “Okay, I guess I have to do this now or else I’m not going to see you again for two years or probably for forever, and I can’t live with that.”

And then he kissed Spencer, really kissed him, in a wonderful, awkward plaintive way, not really touching at all, just pressing a little against one another, and then it was finished and Spencer closed his eyes and couldn’t think of what to say, because maybe he’d been waiting for that for two years, and longer still.

“So I think I could love you,” Ryan said.

“Yeah,” Spencer said, breathless. “Me too.”

And Ryan said, “I think I kind of always did.”


End file.
